CHICAGO (CBS) — Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the federal racketeering case against former Ald. Ed Burke (14th), once the most powerful member of the Chicago City Council.
Burke, who stepped away from politics last year as the longest-serving member of the City Council, following 54 years in office, is accused of trading political favors for lucrative business contracts for his law firm.
CBS 2 political reporter Chris Tye previews what is expected to be a six-week trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago.
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Rise from rookie alderman to powerful Finance Committee chair
If politics is a machine in Chicago, few have managed the mechanism as well and as long as Edward Michael Burke.
“It’s a humbling experience to reflect back on nearly a half-century at City Hall,” said in a 2018 speech to the City Club of Chicago.
His career spans seven decades of Chicago political history, nearly half as long as City Hall has been standing. In the coming days and weeks, the city will learn how the final chapters of his storied political life will end. But first, let’s look at how it began.
In 1969, a 26-year-old Burke, fresh from DePaul University law school and a few years walking the police beat, including the prior year’s contentious Democratic National Convention, won a special election to take his father’s place as alderman of the 14th Ward on the South Side, after his father died of cancer in 1968.
Burke quickly assembled a campaign for a full term as 14th Ward alderman. He’d win that race in 1971, and the next 13 elections that followed, creating a political grip that spanned nine mayors, and more than 240 colleagues on City Council.
His career included championing indoor smoking bans, keeping Lake Michigan clean, and exonerating Catherine O’Leary — long labeled as responsible for the Great Chicago Fire.
But most Chicagoans know him for the very public and dramatic “Council Wars” of the 1980’s. Burke and Ald. Vrdolyak led a group of 29 city council members – the vast majority of them white – to stymie the agenda of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington.
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Burke would run briefly for mayor after Washington died in office in 1987, but the seat of power he’d occupy longest was head of the city’s all-important Finance Committee.
Scandals followed him — from questions over using taxpayer-funded drivers to why his South Side street always seemed to be plowed first whenever it snowed.
He would survive the little earthquakes, and the bigger ones, to become the longest-serving member of City Council in Chicago history.
Later in his career, the harsh critic of Harold Washington championed a new crop of largely African-American aldermen.
He and his wife — now retired Illinois Supreme Court Justice Ann Burke, who helped found the Special Olympics — adopted an African American child known as Baby T, who had been placed in foster care due to his mother’s addiction to drugs.
The family Burke had a family business, politics, and its patriarch knew it and navigated it with precision.
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FBI raids prelude political downfall
But on November 6, 2018, word came fast that the FBI had zeroed in on the alderman. His City Hall and ward offices papered over and pored over by the feds.
Despite a call to resign by some in City Hall, he remained a fixture, though quieter, and would resign as Finance Committee chair after the feds leveled the first batch of charges against him in January 2019.
Last fall, he decided not to run for office again. By then, details had emerged in the federal case against him: former City Council colleague Danny Solis had recorded private calls and meetings, leading to 14 federal counts against Burke.
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The feds have accused Burke of abusing his power at city hall to steer business to his private law firm — pressuring clients from Binny’s, to a Burger King franchisee, to those refurbishing the Old Post Office building downtown.
“I’ve done nothing wrong,” Burke said after he was first charged in January 2019. “I believe that I’m not guilty of anything, and I’m trusting that when I have my day in court, that will be clear beyond a reasonable doubt.”
That day is now here.
“The evidence is pretty overwhelming”
Former Ald. Dick Simpson, who spent 8 years on City Council with Burke, and now is political science professor emeritus at University of Illinois at Chicago, said “The evidence is pretty overwhelming” against Burke, particularly the recordings provided by Solis.
“It’s pretty hard when jury hears a person speaking on tape saying things that convict them from their own words,” Simpson said. “Since 1976 alone, there have been 2,100 convictions in federal court for public corruption, and 1,800 of those have been in the Chicago metropolitan region.”
A total of 37 Chicago aldermen have gone to jail on various charges, with at least one other former alderperson awaiting trial.
Burke’s trial is slated to last six weeks.
In the end, the question boils down to this: did Ed Burke use the Chicago political machine to enrich himself?
If a jury says yes, he could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Burke isn’t the only defendant in the case.
He’s being tried along with former political aide Peter Andrews Jr., who worked alongside Burke for years, and Chicago attorney Charles Cui, who is accused of bribing Burke.
